Tower Hamlets council grants distribution by electoral ward

Spitalfields and Banglatown is the smallest ward in Tower Hamlets with a population* of 10,286 people. Analysis by Love Wapping indicates that each resident of Spitalfields and Banglatown benefits from £107 of grants from Tower Hamlets Council.

By contrast residents of Millwall, with 23,083 residents the largest ward in the borough, only get £2.30 each in grants.

Tower Hamlets council grants distribution by electoral ward

Click on the image to view a larger version.

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The ‘Grant Amount per Ward Resident’ figure is a division of the total grants awarded to a ward divided by the number of ward residents.

See the data, get the data

The data visualisation above is based on two data sets, grant awards to organisations in a ward and the population of each ward. Here’s the data.

*Census 2011 data source: Office for National Statistics licensed under the Open Government Licence v.2.0. Grants funding data is taken from Tower Hamlets Council documents (see below).

The quote below is taken from the Tower Hamlets Council website.

“Millwall is largest ward in London (and 52nd largest in England and Wales) with a population of 23,083. Spitalfields and Banglatown is the smallest ward in the borough with a population of 10,286”

So why such a difference?

You woz robbed Millwall

In a previous post Love Wapping looked at the consolidated figures for all the various grant ‘pots’ and tried to make sense of them. The data was presented alone without any comparison top another dataset. The main reason for this is because it is not possible to directly map the figures for grant awards to other statistics such as ward population. This remains the case. A grant awarded to an organisation based in Spitalfields and Banglatown might benefit the residents of Millwall. Or it might not.

As the graphic above shows the disparity of grant distribution to organisations across the borough is huge.

Further analysis of the data first published has led to the figures, primarily for Mainstream Grants (MSG), being revised upwards. This is because a significant number of organisations were awarded sums in excess of the grant requested.

Reason for increase in amount of grant funding is due to discovering that a significant number of grant applicants had the funding amounts they applied for increased by Tower Hamlets Council.

Response from Tower Hamlets Council

The issue of the seeming imbalance in the distribution of council grants across Tower Hamlets was put to the council. Unfortunately they cannot provide an explanation at the moment, response below.

“Given that the report from PwC is due to be published shortly and that, as requested by the Secretary of State, it will focus on four key areas including the area of grant-giving, we feel it would be inappropriate for us to comment further at this stage.We are likely to issue a statement once the PwC report has been published.”

So until the DCLG publishes the report by its auditors into the councils’ activities, more likely to be November according to sources, residents will just have to wait and see what happens.

What’s the point of charts and tables?

As previously stated by Love Wapping the reason for acquiring, analysing and publishing charts and tables of data is quite simple. This is all public money. And those who decide how and where that money is spent have a duty to demonstrate what they do with it. Seems fair.

In other parts of London and the UK local authorities take this responsibility seriously. In Tower Hamlets this is not the case.